


Freefall

by InkStainedFingers



Category: Star Wars Episode VII: The Force Awakens (2015)
Genre: Established Relationship, M/M, Post TFA, Shared Dreaming, Vague mentions of sex, as close to hurt/comfort as these two are going to get, awkward cuddling, kind of, neither of them are nice really
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-01-12
Updated: 2017-01-12
Packaged: 2018-09-16 22:43:13
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,116
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9292754
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/InkStainedFingers/pseuds/InkStainedFingers
Summary: The night after the disaster at Starkiller Base, Kylo Ren pays a visit to the General's quarters.





	

**Author's Note:**

> So, this is my first attempt at Star Wars fic-these two are awful and their chemistry interests me a lot, so I thought I'd dip my toe in. Quick note: reading this a second time, I realised that the last section could be interpreted as showing suicidal thoughts, and while it's meant to be a bit vague and confused, tw for that just in case.

He does not remember arriving at the medbay. He remembers the girl, and the snow, and the shame, hotter than the pain. He remembers swimming towards consciousness and finding himself in a shuttle, remembers a team of rattled Stormtroopers and General Hux sitting on the bench opposite him, face drawn as he stared at the patch of floor between his boots. He remembers sinking into the blackness again, and then he wakes under the bright lights and brisk hands of the medbay.

They want to put him in a bacta tank, but he refuses. Perhaps he throws something, perhaps he roars like a wounded animal, perhaps he crushes their will with the Force, he doesn’t care. He will not be here any longer, under all these staring eyes. Many of them have never seen his face before and here he is in front of them all worse than naked, the very skin burnt away from him. He needs to leave.

His wounds have been bandaged, at least, and there must be bacta pads under the bandages that have been at work for a while, otherwise he doubts that he would be standing. He shoves aside the frightened staff, grabbing for his tattered clothes and biting back a grunt of pain as he pulls them on, striding towards the exit. The first medic who argues with him is flung against the opposite wall, and the rest close their mouths and cower. Everything inside him is hot and furious, as though the scavenger girl had plunged her- _his_ -lightsaber through his entire body, instead of just part of it.

His vision flits in red and black, and he does not feel solid until he is standing before the door to his own quarters, hand poised to key in his personal code, when he finds himself tilting to the side, catching the doorframe to steady himself. His grandfather waits for him on the other side of that door. The thought drains his rage, leaving room for the pain to come crashing back in. He tries to stifle a groan and fails, his grip tightening on the steel frame.

He is not sure that he can look his grandfather in the face, tonight.

He makes a vague show to himself of considering his options, before limping in the direction of the only other place he would ever really have gone tonight.

* * *

 

He has no need of the code for General Hux’s quarters, reaching out with the Force. The locking mechanisms don’t resist him, sliding compliantly back under his familiar compulsion and allowing him to slip into the general’s quarters, sealing the door behind him. Ren passes through the anteroom, noting the chaotic mess on Hux’s desk, and heads straight for the bedroom.

Although the lights are set at zero, the general’s bedroom is coated in thin silvery light from the floor-to-ceiling viewport, where thousands upon thousands of stars blink in. The light washes the colour from everything and outlines the bed-double the standard bunk size, with rank came privilege-and on it, the general himself. His red hair is the only thing in the room that has clung to some of its colour, falling across his face without the usual severe gel. He lies on the far side of the bed, turned away from Ren, thin shoulders huddled over under the sheets. A brush over his mind tells Ren that he is asleep.

Regardless, Ren stumbles to the bedside and begins to shed his clothing again, dropping it carelessly on the floor. It is pleasing to see it there, where it has been before, rather than folded in the medbay like a symbol of everything weak and pathetic. At any rate, it is filthy and will likely have to be incinerated. His movements are stiff and cautious over his wounds, pain shooting through his body at every moment, and when he is down to his underwear he allows himself to peel back the well-made sheets of the empty side and sit on the bed.

Hux is not an interesting sleeper. He lies on his side, and does not move an inch or utter a sound from the moment he falls asleep until the moment he wakes. He sleeps unobtrusively, like a cadet, trying not to draw attention to himself. When he wakes now, he does not make a sound, but a knife flashes towards Ren’s throat, small and silver in the starlight like a tiny fish darting in the dark.

Ren catches it absently with the Force, continuing to edge his undershirt carefully over his head, making an effort not to pull on the wrappings at his bad shoulder. Hux’s wrist is trapped in midair, clutching the knife, and Ren hears a sigh when the general realises who that signifies. A vicious poke jabs him suddenly in the hip, right on the bandage covering the ugly, weeping blister that gapes around the point where the Wookie had blasted him. He isn’t fast enough to bite back an agonised yelp as pain lances hot through his chest and leg and he loses his grip on the Force for long enough that Hux can snatch his hand free.

“Don’t use that on me,” Hux hisses, sliding the little knife back under his pillow.

“My hands were occupied,” he replies, his voice hoarse and dry as he glances over his shoulder after ridding himself of the undershirt. Hux looks terrible. He was already pale, but now his skin looks near-transparent, dark purple smears of exhaustion under slightly bloodshot eyes. He hasn’t lost that weary, drawn look from the shuttle, narrow shoulders hunched and tense, and his gaze is a little unhinged the way it sometimes is at the climax of one of his rally speeches.

“You look kriffing awful,” Hux tells him, eyes raking over all the reddening bandages. Ren shrugs, then winces and bites back a grunt.

“I killed my-Ben Solo’s father today,” he says, testing the words. They taste thick, and a little sour.

“I’d have killed mine too, if it had been necessary,” Hux says blandly. “But it did not win us a victory, did it?”

Ren does not challenge this. He can hear the cold honesty of it, can see the hollow-eyed way Hux stares out of his viewport, where the threatening mass of Starkiller Base had once loomed palely, but now there is no more than a confused mess of suspended debris.  

“What are you doing here?” Hux asks, even more emotionlessly than usual. Perhaps on another day the lack of a sneer in his voice would have unbalanced Ren, but he is too tired for that, tonight, exhaustion filling the marrow of his bones like lead.

“Don’t be deliberately obtuse,” Ren replies, gritting his teeth against the pain as he swings his legs slowly into the bed, one by one, his movements careful but stiff.

“Oh, fine,” Hux huffs, half-angrily pulling his regulation grey tank top over his head and uncharacteristically letting it drop to the floor on his side of the bed. The metal tags that hang from his neck glint in the darkness, winking back at the stars. Ren is strangely captivated by them. He does not, of course, have any of his own, but it had stirred him oddly when he had touched them in the past, rubbing a thumb over the engraved letters, the metal somehow warmed by Hux’s cold blood. It is the only part of the General’s uniform that never comes off, and the part that is almost never seen. He had pulled back quickly to dress and leave as he always did, unnerved by the intimacy of it, the nakedness of Hux’s first name carved under his thumb.

Ren does not try to touch them now, but when Hux moves to slide out of his pyjama pants, he halts him with a broad hand spread on the pale skin of his narrow chest.

“No, not that,” he murmurs, already drowsy from pain medication and the hush of the familiar starlit room. “Just…”

He lets his hand slip from Hux’s chest and settles flat on his back, seemingly the only position that will not aggravate his injuries on either side. He relaxes with a deep sigh and lets his eyes close. He can feel Hux’s gaze on him from where he is sitting at his side, incredulous and sharp as the knife he had pulled out when Ren had surprised him earlier. He is a man who lives by routine and regulation, and this is neither for them. Ren does not come to his bed to sleep. Hearing Hux gathering himself to make an objection, Ren slowly moves his arm out, opening up the space along his side by letting it rest at a distance from him, as though he intends to sleep that way. Eyes closed, bandaged face pointed to the ceiling, he wordlessly offers his uninjured shoulder.

Anything Hux had been preparing to say vanishes abruptly. The ruffled surface of his thoughts goes still with shock.

They stay like that, perfectly still, for long moments, statues with their edges picked out in slight silvery light. Then slowly, so slowly, Hux creeps forwards, until he is lying beside Ren in the dark, fitting himself hesitantly into the space. Ren senses his wariness, makes no move to pull him down or trap him there, careful to keep his stillness. Eventually Hux is settled against Ren’s side, mindful this time of the wound on his hip.

A shuddering breath skitters across his collarbone as Hux lays his head in the offered space on Ren’s shoulder. His arms are folded stiffly over his own chest, pressed against Ren’s side, a barrier between them. From the viewport, the remains of Starkiller Base watch them like a colossal, ruined eye, ghoulish and accusing, cratered and scarred and barely hanging in a spherical shape, not unlike the skull of their Supreme Leader, whose retribution they will no doubt face soon.

Another short eternity later, Ren feels Hux turn his face more closely into his shoulder, the slight scrape of his unshaven cheek, the tip of his nose, the soft curve of his lips, slightly parted where his breath ghosts with a regular prickle of heat over Ren’s skin. A slender hand comes to rest on his chest, then curls into a tight fist. The body lying against him gives a tiny shiver. Ren senses it like the turmoil at the bottom of deep water bringing a slight ripple to the surface. As often as Hux accuses him of being rash and impulsive, he is aware that there are some things that can only be waited for. Finally, at this, he curls the arm that is still strong around his general, clasping them together like wreckage clasped together to make a raft in a storm. It is only because Hux’s mouth rests against his skin that he notices the tiny gasp, the skip in his breath.

* * *

Ren is not certain when either of them fell asleep. Perhaps they lay like that for hours, wrapped around each other, wakeful and silent, perhaps they slept straight away. At any rate, they must both be sleeping to be woken when dawn begins to break through the viewport. He wakes suddenly and the room is steeped in delicious ruddy light, a light that paints everything crimson, catching in Hux’s hair and making it glint fire. Ren cannot see Hux’s face, tucked against his neck, but he knows that he is awake too, in the bone-deep way he knows that they have woken into the same dream: an impossible dawn in open space. As the light grows, it whitens and whitens, beginning to sear on their skin, yet neither of them stirs a muscle.

It is then that Ren realises calmly that this light is no dawn, but the beam of the Starkiller weapon, trained directly on the two of them. He feels foolish for not realising it sooner. Hux knows, surely. Hux would know his weapon anywhere.

The beam is impossible to stop or deflect, this close. It will burn the skin off them. It will blaze through their flesh, charring it, melting their bodies together in its annihilating heat, skin and bone and muscle all burnt together into one single cloud of ash. Ren closes his eyes idly when the light becomes too much to bear. He is not afraid, too full of something deep and peaceful. In his arms, Hux lies heavy and relaxed, waiting for their fate with a kind of serenity Ren has never sensed in him while awake. The light roars silently towards them, consuming everything, and they are lost.

It is not such a bad dream.  

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks for reading, any and all feedback is hugely appreciated!


End file.
